Seeking Authentic Voice

I have only a few words in this feeble prayer.  I am listening. I am learning. I am examining myself. I am trying to recognize how the system of racism lives in and through me. It’s like a tangled up ball of yarn. I untangle one layer only to encounter another.  Until it’s all untangled, the yarn cannot be knit, the potential of the yarn is compromised. written for the RevGalBlogPals blog, Tuesday Prayer.

On Thursday night a group of us in Dearborn participated in a conversation led by myself and other members of the Dearborn Area Interfaith Network on the Reconstruction Era, the post civil war years of 1865-1877. We watched videos on the history of that time and talked about how the issues of those years are still the issues of today: how racism is forming and informing everything from family life to church communities to schools, and the government.  We planned this event last fall, never anticipating the state of affairs we find ourselves living in now. Although the conversation was somewhat of an intellectual exercise, staying in the head instead of the heart, it pointed out the need for white people to know our history, and to do our work to change,  so we can stop repeating our long history of racism and violence toward black and brown people.  This week Krista Tippet, in her show On Being, interviewed Resmaa Manakem, a black therapist in Minneapolis who stu...

This week our Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori and our diocesan Bishop Wendell Gibbs invited all Episcopal Churches to participate in an ecumenical movement to work toward ending racism.  We were asked to dedicate this day to pondering the sin of racism and how we can work for reconciliation. Many years ago when I was in seminary the students and faculty had to participate in an anti-racism workshop. At the time anti-racism training was a new concept. One common refrain from a number of seminarians was, “I am not racist.” We all wanted to believe that and to believe that we really wanted equality and justice. The thing is, blatant racism is easily recognized and usually met with outrage, but more often racism appears in subtle ways, so systemic to our institutions, culture, faith, and politics that we fail to recognize it. For example Christians often speak of the “dark night of the soul.” It’s meant to describe a desolate time when God feels distant and life fee...

The first time I flew on an airplane was the summer of 1971. I was fourteen years old and we were moving to Ft. Worth, Texas. My mother dressed us in matching outfits - she and I wore blue dresses with white stripes, white sandals and floppy white straw hats. My dad and brothers wore blue and white striped shirts with white pants and white shoes. There’s a photograph of all of us at O’Hare airport in Chicago waiting to depart. I barely remember sitting for that photo and I have no memory of the flight. Memory is curious that way, leaving out huge details of one’s life while other aspects remain in sharp detail.  That year I was in the ninth grade and attended Southwest High School in Ft. Worth. I played bass clarinet in the school band, took Spanish which I loved and algebra which I hated. The whole school would turn out for football games and the stadium vibrated when we sang the school song, “Dixie” while the Confederate flag flew above us.  Before moving to Texas ...

I've been thinking about racism lately. Actually I think about it a lot, along with the other isms. I thought about isms when "So You Think You Can Dance" ended up with two women as finalists. That's a first for these reality television shows, and kind of cool! Made me wonder what's going on? Of course my next thought was, "the white woman will win." I'm convinced that racism and sexism are so pervasive, so unconscious, as a cultural norm, that our group "think" lives into acts of prejudice and then denies it because of how the game is played. As far as that television show, it may be that Melanie really was the better dancer, but as a dance major myself, I couldn't be certain of that. More to the point I'm thinking of the book, "The Help" and the recently released movie version. I listened to the book on my iPod while driving from Arizona to Illinois in 2010. I wrote about it here . I'm thinking about the comments th...